I have got to start bringing the panniers to work on Fridays so I can get my farmers' market purchases home more easily. I keep heading out the door in the morning thinking, "Oh, I don't need the panniers today — I'm just getting some dates and some salad mix."

Which of course turns into four pounds of dates, three pounds of almonds, two and a half pounds of sweet potatoes, two bunches of kale, a bunch of chard, a bundle of asparagus, a large bag of salad mix, and three adorable little purple cabbages the size of my fist.

Yo, I've been married to a New Yorker* for 13 years, I got no fuckin' problem with swearing.

Dood, we have a twelve-month growing season here. For any particular winter, there's only a 50% chance it'll ever get below freezing. And this is my favorite gardeningbook, which is so closely tailored to the part of the East Bay where I live that it might as well be titled A Guide to Year-Round Gardening in That Patch of Dirt in the Oversized Planter Out Back of the Parking Lot, the One the Red PT Cruiser Parks in Front Of:

We live in such a bountiful area, it's ludicrous. (It's also a case of I-hafta-laugh-or-I'm-gonna-cry that we've paved over so much fertile land.) It's a big part of why the idea of making a go of it as urban farmers seems feasible. We probably just lack imagination, though — the people who created the farming technique we're planning to use live in Saskatchewan. What's the growing season there? Two months maybe, from when you can chip the ice away to the first snowstorm? ;-)

This is the chart of what's in season when put out by one of the local local-food organizations (click for the large-enough-to-be-legible version):

I like it in the summer when I get a bunch of four-foot long sunflowers at the market and have to ride home with them bungied to my cargo rack or to my backpack. I get some double-takes and a fair number of smiles. Big mood-booster.

I could not pass up BABY CABBIDGE when it was sitting there next to the register. Whooza cute little cruciferous vegetable, then? You are! Yes you are! Wuzza wuzza wuzza. I just want to chop you up and massage you with salt, I do. (The plan is for them to go into a batch of sauerkraut with a larger head of green cabbage tomorrow.)

I know you're probably about as likely to get out to the Bay Area as I am to get to Columbus any time soon, but if you ever do, I would so love to take you to some of the farmers' markets around here. And you know I have opinions about which ones are best...

*Seriously, it's done terrible things to my vocabulary! I was a soft-spoken Northern California type when I met him. Now I'm a mostly soft-spoken Northern California type who swears a lot more. Heh.

That is an awesomely useful chart. Thank you. I will have to jot it down before the link expires. Previously I just went to the market and said "hmm, five booths have this and it is relatively cheap, it must be in season".

If the link is to S3 (s3.amazonaws.com), then no. The AWSAccessKeyId parameter is tied to Expires and Signature. If memory serves the first is static to who you (or your provider) is; it looks like the standard Amazon user/marketplace/vendor encryption. (you could test this if you are sufficiently curious by creating a second link to the image and comparing the strings) The last two, Expires and Signature, are entangled based upon the request for an S3 item. (again, for the curious, try the link but remove those URL parameters, and you'll see a cryptic XML error message)

That said, if your provider gives you a link that redirects to S3 (by creating a new signature on each click).. well, then it depends on whether that provider requires you to login to get to that image. I would expect that they do, which would still leave you with a "no" answer. If their link is to their own site and you can see it when logged out, then yes.

So it seems unlikely for Tumblr. Images uploaded to LJ aren't in cloud storage so have static URLs and there are no doubt a lot of better and more stable image hosting services that do not use the cloud.

Which is a long way of saying "unlikely unless you put the image elsewhere". Sorry, my geek mode has a tendancy of making non-geeks feel either frangible or extremely bored.